This project studies the anxieties and uncertainties that governed relationships between secular British strategies of governance and the Sikh tradition by examining the how peoples globally contested the meaning of sovereignty through the deposed Maharaja Duleep Singh of Punjab at the end of the 19th Century” (creative/Post-Colonial studies with Psychoanalytic infusion).

This work proposes to “reckon with America’s historical unconscious and its constitutive role in the formation of the individual psyche. Her dissertation will reframes the mid-century poetics preoccupation with “racialized crisis of being” by investigating the 1950-70 period in which profound anxiety and tensions around whiteness surfaced among canonical avant-garde and activist poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, John Sinclair and Jane Stembridge—(all engaged in different ways in the antiracist organizing of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements).

Doha’s project focuses on the psycho-racial and libidinal structure of the War on Terror with a specific focus on the May 2013 massacre of Islamic practitioners in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The project investigates how foundational Islamic texts (Qur’an, Sunnah, Hadith, Sharia) have been mobilized to confront the problems of secularization, modernization, and economic crisis, it also traces the inner lives of both postcolonial secular and Islamic subjects through a critical psychoanalytic and ethnographic engagement.

McCoy’s project is an ethnographic examination of a segregated, working-class interface community in east Belfast that suffers from the legacy of “the Troubles,” an ethno-nationalist conflict which disproportionately affected this small area. In the community under study, Protestants and Catholics are surveilled through CCTV and armored patrols and kept separate from one another by security infrastructure called “peace walls.” Through person-centered and psychoanalytically informed research, his dissertation describes the psychological and embodied experiences of residents who live in spaces circumscribed by an array of walls made of concrete, slatted steel, barbed wire, and weld mesh as they commemorate the past, heal in the present, and prepare for an uncertain future in their precarious State.

2014 Hayman Fellows

Niccole Leilanionapae’aina Coggins (UC Santa Barbara – History)—“I Wish They Would Leave Those Negro Soldiers Alone”: Native Hawaiian and Japanese American Perceptions and Interactions with Blacks in World War II Hawai’i.

Coggins’ dissertation examines how race is constructed and contested in Hawai’i’s territorial period, focusing on the perceptions and interactions that Native Hawaiians and Japanese Americans had with Blacks neae the time of World War II (1935-1949). The dissertation draws on previously unused Hawaiian sources (including student written journals and papers), as well as local newspapers. Her privileging of local voices (rather than those of the colonizers) illustrates the temporal reality of day-to-day life on the ground, and also how the ground of race itself shifted over the course of the war. Contrary to the standard narrative that Hawai’i’s multicultural racial paradigm is a model for solving the United States’ racial problems, Coggins argues that Hawai’i operates on the same Black-White racial paradigm as the mainland U.S.

Sherazi’s dissertation explores the temporal, aesthetic, and ethical implications of posthumously published literary texts by such authors as Ralph Ellison, William Demby, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Her work troubles biographical criticism of such texts and considers the ways in which the time of the posthumously published text gestures back to the historical moment of its writing, even as it highlights shifting conceptions of social identities across time. As such, the mid-century American context is a particularly compelling temporal node for considerations of excess and embodiment in relationship to textuality. Psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious, mourning and melancholia, repetition, and the illusion of mastery are central to her project’s examination of our reading and writing practices and their interconnectedness with considerations of mortality.

Beauchamp’s dissertation project questions the assumption that literary modernism shared an intimate relationship with psychoanalysis. She traces the modernist literary repudiations of the Freudian apparatus in great detail and assesses how forms of the rejection of the analytic model in turn inform anti-psychiatric thinking and clinical practices in the sixties and seventies.

Selamawit D. Terrefe, UC Irvine (Dept. of English)—”Dissociative States: The Metaphysics of Blackness and the Psychic Afterlife of Slavery”

Terrefe’s dissertation analyzes mimetic, psychic and political concerns around structural violence within African-American and African texts. Her comparative project conceptualizes the psychic continuum of violence for Africans and African-descended peoples in the U.S., and the unconscious processes that structure global power relations according to a “racial calculus,” which assutures slaveness to blackness.